Technology of Longevity, Improper Life and the Changing Face of End-of-Life Care in Hong Kong and Singapore

Abstract

In my project studying the thanatopolitics in Chinese immigrant societies, I aim to map out the transformation of end-of-life care from folklore practices to modern medical services in Hong Kong and Singapore. The history of end-of-life care in Hong Kong and Singapore shows that the related services emerged in mid-19th Century as a mutual-aid practice among immigrants during British colonization. The transformation of end-of-life services, however, is related to their experiences with urbanization and the introduction of modern medicine. The transition from household care to charity amenities to medical institutions illustrates not only how completely modern constitutions in these societies have achieved but also how much people in these societies have accepted and felt at ease with a type of dying originally unfamiliar to them. In this presentation, employing historical and ethnographic methods, I ask how traditional practice of end-of-life care emerged as a discursive center of impoverishment in the context of modern state building and how modern medical technologies re-shaped the politics of end-of-life care. I start out from the recent debate on the quality of death among citizens of Hong Kong and Singapore. And then I review historically how modern medicine in these two Chinese immigrant settlements capture end-of-life care through technologies that promise protection and elongation of life. Finally, borrowing the concept of proper and improper life explained by Martin Heidegger, I discuss how the contents and definitions of “good death” have been deliberated between modern medical life and grounded beliefs.